Astronaut Chris Hadfield: Where Should Space Explorers Go Next?

Earlier this year, astronaut Chris Hadfield captivated the people of Earth with his wild demonstration videos and musical performances from the International Space Station. This month he recounts his story in the new book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. Hadfield tells PopMech why he loves Twitter, what he thought of Gravity, and where human space explorers should go next.

The videos you shot on the International Space Station caught on like wildfire down here. Why did you start making them, and how did you feel about becoming an astronaut celebrity?

I never thought about the second part of that. Truly, I was just living an amazing sequence of adventures and trying to figure out the best way to share them. That didn't really change from my first two flights. My motivation, my impetus, was the same. It's just this time the technology and opportunity caught up with it.

The first two flightsthe first one up to Mir and the second one to do spacewalks on the ISSthey were very action-packed, and they were on the order of a week or two. And we didn't have a direct way to show people what we were doing. I could take a film picture and talk on a ham radio, but that's really not the same. It's really hard to share that. I still have 35-mm slides that they gave me a month after I landed that are really good! But how do I show someone in Australia my really good 35-mm slide when I'm not there?

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So the real difference in this flight, number one, was the technology. We had and have the ability to take an electronic picture and then, with connectivity to the Web, be able to real-time-share not just the image but the real import of it, the emotion and the thought and the insight into what's going on. So that made a big difference.

Also the time. I wasn't just up there for a week or 10 days. I was up for the better part of half a year. I would work my regular day, get up at 6 in the morning and do NASA stuff steady until about 8 at night. We're supposed to be in bed at 10 at nightbut I would normally work until about 1 in the morning to get all those other things done.

Ha, yeah. Actually . . . Twitter's really efficient. You can send a tweet in a couple of minutes, so to send five tweets takes 10 minutes. It's a beautiful vehicle for sharing an experience. It's perfect for astronauts.

It just caught on like wildfire. I was aware of itI'd look at the Twitter numbers going, "Holy cow, that's a lot of people paying attention! That's great!" But that was by no means the focus of what I was doing. The job up there is really, really busy. We set records for the number of hours of science done, the number of experiments done, so we really focused on that. But it was great to be able to weave in enough time that people could share it.

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In the book, you recount a scary incident from a previous trip to space in which you couldn't see during a spacewalk [full details here]. Was that the scariest thing that happened to you up there?

It wasn't scary. It was a serious problemit greatly threatened my ability to work outside. I definitely couldn't continue what I was supposed to be doing up there. It would've been scary if we'd never thought about it, or I didn't really understand what was going on, or I didn't understand how my suit worked. But I had spent years getting ready for just that event. I trained hard for things to go right, but I trained doubly hard for things to go wrong. Scott and I had practiced many times what we called incapacitated crew rescue, where, for whatever reason, one of us can no longer do whatever you're supposed to do. Maybe you get a puncture in your suit, or your oxygen system starts failing. Suddenly, you have to go help the other person. We've developed all kinds of techniques for how you grab them, tether them, bring them back, stuff them back in the air lock, get them plugged back into ship's oxygen, get the hatch closed, and save the day. But I wasn't in those real dire straits. I could still hear and think. It was actually kind of peaceful. Oh, well, I'm out here holding on to a spaceship, blinking away.

It was not terrifying. And not because of some ridiculous comic book sort of bravery, but only because we had prepared for it.

I did! I was at the North American premiere, at the Toronto International Film Festival. One of the people in the audience put up his hand and said, "Hey, I hear Commander Hadfield's here in the audience. What did he think of the movie?" So I ran down and jumped up onto the stage, and the director came over and put his hands on my shoulder and said, "Be kind," which I thought was a funny thing to say.

The movie is visually better than any space movie ever done. I don't know how he did those graphics, but his visuals are phenomenally good. They are as rich and detailed and finely grained as reality. But it's not a space story. It's a human-triumph story. She could've been on a ship or in a mine or anywhere. They just chose a space setting and put Sandra's character through all of those perils. Technically, it's not accurateit's not supposed to be. It's not a NASA training filmit's a movie. It was a lot of fun.

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It took some good fortune for you to become an astronautthere weren't even Canadian astronauts when you began your journey. Given today's uncertainty about NASA's future, how would you feel if you were thinking about becoming an astronaut today?

I'd feel exactly the same. It was exactly like that. Back when I was trying to get into it, Challenger had just happened in '86. The whole program ground to a haltstopped for years. There was not a vehicle going to space. There was no cooperation with the Soviets at the time. There was no viable space program. Trying to convince ourselves to build a space station? I think it passed in Congress by one vote. It was so nip and tuck. It wasn't going to happen, and Canada decided to pull out of it the year I got selected.

And it's never been certain. We are always at the mercy of the next launch. The whole thing will grind to a halt if the next launch is unsuccessful. You're not choosing to be a mailman or something that has some guarantee to it. You're choosing to do something that is right on the edge of possible. I bet my career that somehow we would prevail and maintain the impetus, at least as long as I was in the program, to maintain human spaceflight. I would make that bet again.

If we do get human explorers beyond low Earth orbit once again, where should we go?

The obvious logical place to go is the thing that shines down on us every single night, telling us to come here next. That's the moon. It's just so elephant-in-the-room logical. We need to invent so many things to go further. We have to test everything. We have to figure out a place to understand it. We have to learn so many lessons. We have to make a lot of mistakesand be able to recover from them. And we need something that is sustainable. We can't make everything a stunt. It has to be a logical progression.

We're doing that really well on the space station. It's only 250 miles up, and it is teaching us how spaceships workhow to keep one working for years. What do you make the hull out of, what propellant do you use, how to you control attitude, how does a toilet work, what food do you eat, how do you keep the crew from going crazy? A lot of real primitive stuff, like they were inventing for sailing ships 700 years ago. Once we've learned all that, the next logical step is to go from 250 miles to 240,000 miles, to the moon, and learn how to do in situ resource collection, etc. It will take a couple of generations of failure and discovery and reinvention before we are capable of safely going farther.

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If the Earth were threatenedif we poisoned the planet, or an asteroid's going to hit us, or a supervolcano's erupting and Earth is going to largely or completely become uninhabitablewe could go to Mars right away. It would be hugely expensive, very complex . . . but we could do it. We could think of all the little problems and build enough reserve. But it's sort of like flying across the Atlantic in 1918. Yeah, we've got wings, and engines, and we know how to make them work. But we don't really have anything very reliable. And if we start launching passenger planes across the Atlantic, we're going to kill a bunch of them.

While that multigenerational buildup happens, we'll keep sending out plucky robotic explorers. Where would you like to see them go?

The fundamental reason ought to be selfish. Why do we need to do this? If we only have $100 to spend, how much should we spend on food, and how much should we spend on health, and education for our kids, and heat? You have to, as a person or a family or a nation or a planet, make all those decisions.

So how much should we spend on going to other places and why? To me, it has to serve our purposes. Number one is understanding planetary health. How do planets behave? You can't learn all about humanity by studying one human body. There are differences between us, and diseases, and things that happen in history, and congenital problems. If you really want to understand people, you've got to study a bunch of people. It's no different for planets and stars. If we really want to understand Earth, we can't just study Earth. We have to go look at the moon, and there's a big amount of the Earth's history in the moon. We need to go to Mars, and say, "How come Mars doesn't have an atmosphere? How much water does Mars have and why? What [about] Mars' magnetic field? What is normal, and what happens over time to a planet and why?"

The other half is purely: When do we send robots, and when do we send people? Robots do some things really well. We've invented robots that do a great job of washing clothes and making toast. We're very good at building robots to do things that we don't want to do, and also things that are risky for us. But when you really want to do something that's interesting, or you want to expand human understanding, then people need to go.

We don't have robots play the symphony. You could have a perfectly programmed robotic version of Beethoven's Fifth and it will never be played more technically wonderfully than if you get it played robotically. But people want to go to the symphony. They want to go hear people interpret the music.

That's why there are people on the space station right now. Part of it is simple science. But a large part of it is being able to see the world and understand what it means, and to record music up there and to talk about what's happening up there, and to bring that new perspective into the human experience.

What can we Earth-bound humans learn from astronauts?

If I had to pick and choose, a pretty important one to me is: Have a purpose to your life. Have a destination in mind. What is in the distance that you are interested in? Don't just let life randomly kick you around. And then make the small decisions on a daily basis that move your life in that direction.

The real key to that, though, is to recognize that the endgame is not the measure of success. Don't say, I want to be the world's best high jumper . . . and then say to yourself, if I didn't break the world record in high jumping, I'm a failure. You can celebrate and be successful in every single event on your way to the long-term goal. That is your life. Your life is not whether you did that jump at the end or not. You life is every single little step along the way.

That's what I did. I never measured my success on whether I got to fly in space or not. I wasn't going to allow myself to define myself as a failure because of something I had almost no control over. Instead, I said, I want to be Neil Armstrong, therefore I'm going to study calculus. I had to study calculus to become an engineer, to become a test pilot, to get selected as an astronaut, to then understand orbital mechanics, to then fly in space. But I really was interested in calculus!